Sound Era Record-holders
Ben-Hur (1925), costing about $4 million (an astronomical sum in those days at twenty-five times the $160,000 average cost of an MGM feature), held the record as the most expensive film going from the silent era into the sound era. It is unclear which film superseded it as the most expensive film, although this is commonly attributed to Hell's Angels (1930), directed by Howard Hughes; the accounts for Hell's Angels show it cost $2.8 million, but Hughes publicised it as costing $4 million, selling it to the media as the most expensive film ever made up to that point. The first film to seriously challenge the record was Gone with the Wind (1939), reported to have cost about $3.9–4.25 million, although sources from the time state that Ben-Hur and—erroneously—Hell's Angels cost more; Wilson, a 1944 biopic of President Woodrow Wilson, also cost about $4 million. The first film that definitively displaced Ben-Hur at the top of the chart was Duel in the Sun in 1946, meaning Ben Hur may possibly have held the record for 21 years.
| Year | Production | Film | Cost (est.) (millions) |
Refs & notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1946 | Duel in the Sun | $5.255 | ||
| 1947 | Forever Amber | $6.375 | ||
| 1951 | Quo Vadis | $7 | ||
| 1956 | The Ten Commandments | $13.5 | ||
| 1959 | Ben-Hur | $15 | ||
| 1962 | Mutiny on the Bounty | $19 | ||
| 1963 | Cleopatra | $31.115 | ||
| 1978 | Superman | $55 | ||
| 1988 | Rambo III | $58 | ||
| 1990 | Die Hard 2 | $62 | ||
| 1991 | Terminator 2: Judgment Day | $94 | ||
| 1994 | True Lies | $100 | ||
| 1995 | Waterworld | $172 | ||
| 1997 | Titanic | $200* | ||
| 2003 | The Matrix Reloaded The Matrix Revolutions |
$237 | ||
| The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) | $260* | |||
| 2005 | King Kong | $207 | ||
| 2006 | X-Men: The Last Stand | $210 | ||
| Superman Returns | $209‡ | |||
| Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest | $225 | |||
| 2007 | Spider-Man 3 | $258* | ||
| Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End | $300 | |||
| Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) |
$450 | |||
* Officially acknowledged figure.
Superman Returns became the official record-holder, but X-Men: The Last Stand which was released a month earlier is estimated to have cost more.
Read more about this topic: List Of Most Expensive Films
Famous quotes containing the words sound and/or era:
“There have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... most Southerners of my parents’ era were raised to feel that it wasn’t respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn’t elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)